Challenges

So as a new company we face a great many challenges and I think it is important to work out and talk about them. For some days things go easy at Unbound, some days not so much. Today was one of those not so successful days. Maybe it was the heat, but things weren’t firing in sync.

Feeling a little defeated, it got me thinking – the entrepreneurship game is a mental game. You have to have the stamina and the confidence to keep it together through the ups and the downs. Cause there will be downs – and bad ones at that. Days where you lose your best customer; days were your costs skyrocket, days where you’re just not at your best. And when you’re starting your own business, you feel that you have to be perfect – that there is no room for error. You feel like you’re on that knife’s edge of success and one wrong step could send you over.

So the challenge is keeping your head calm. It is not getting too excited about the success and not too thrown by the defeats. No skill is more important to the entrepreneur than the one that allows you to stand up, dust yourself and go into the ring again.

Now, how do you actually do that? It is nice to talk about dusting yourself off, but how to you actually do it. First, find the positive. No matter how bad the meeting, how bad the day, try and find the one good thing. The thing that you learned from it so you could do better next time. Even if that one positive thing is “well, at least its over”. Also, do not dwell on the issues. Once that meeting is over, its over. Once you’ve lost that sale, its lost and you have to move on. You can never replay the conversation – or it will just get to you. Lastly, and most importantly, the team. A sign of a good team is that they are at their best when things are at their worst. The team should and needs to be the hand that pulls you back up on that knife edge.

So what do you do to deal with pressure? What do you do when you’ve been dealt a blow?